Becoming

and making peace with the dissonance in between

Photo by Matthew Fassnacht on Unsplash

Do you ever feel like you’re constantly inhabiting the in-between moments in life? Waiting for the next thing to arrive? Trying desperately to be present, grounded, fully there for the joys brought in the everyday – whether it’s a steaming cup of salted dark chocolate on a driech day, or the first kiss of sun on your bare skin after months of being swaddled in wool, or the rolling, high-pitched laughter that peels so easily from you when something’s unexpectedly funny. But still, your mind is attached to the latest manuscript, or next talk, or next… monument, whatever that may be for you.

I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (late to the game as usual) and it deeply resonates with the mindset I’ve been cultivating these last few years, since burning out at age thirty. I didn’t know I was neurodivergent or chronically ill back then; but I knew something had to change, because I was simply not able to meet the expectations of a neurotypical world that isn’t built for me. I’ve been working to the beat of my own drum for eight years now (thanks to the financial support of my neurotypical husband, who does function in a neurotypical world), but I’m still guilty of seeing my working successes as a sign of my personal worth and value.

This book interrogate our belief that we tiny humans are inherently important to the functioning of the world – if we put down our work, it will stop spinning. It’s a mindset that keeps us working every hour of the day, diligently, under the canopy of capitalism. Pushing through illness, because it’s ‘too important’ to hand over to someone else. Or because we’re the only one who can do it, or it’s just ‘easier’ to do it ourselves.

Before that, I read Emma Gannon’s The Success Myth, which follows a similar discussion, where Emma shares her own experience of packing-up her hugely successful podcast after years of dedicated work, re-focusing her energy onto her brilliant Substack, and generally just going a little easier on herself. She shares how her perspective on productivity has totally shifted, and how she’s working on disentangling herself from her career being tied to her sense of worth.

I’ve been re-adjusting my compass, too. It’s been a pretty busy few years since my first burnout in early 2017. It was the first time I gave myself permission to actually call myself a writer, even though I’d been writing a blog, and reviews for an arts platform, for a few years at that point, alongside my PR and events work in publishing. It was a couple of years prior that I wrote a memoir piece, about a significant point in my teenagehood, when I realised there could be a work of fiction from this. I gave myself permission to write without expectation, to see what would happen.

I never expected what came next. The voice of a fully-formed seventeen year-old boy, all his colour and light and shadow, his deepest fears and wildest dreams tearing him apart, splashing and bleeding across the pages, soaking the paper faster than I could keep up. He told me his story and I did my best to listen, to get it down. And pretty early on, she came, too. Seventeen, strong as fuck, fierce, and desperately lost and looking for answers. Where are they? Can I help her find them?

They collided and smashed and grated; metal on metal, melting into one another, pulling and pushing in the binary of love.

I gave them everything I have. They are all of me, and I am them.

I wrote as often as I could, through burnout, moving house, trauma therapy. In 2018 I set up a writers group, where like-minded people encouraged me to keep going and I finished the first draft, writing two thousand words per-day, minimum, with weekends off. I set it aside, I went back. I kept digging. In 2019-2020 I did a business course for creatives, and a screenwriting course. I listened to my beta readers. I learnt my craft.

2021-2023 was largely Inklusion – setting up, building a website, creating content, our mission, launching, raising the funds, collaborating, researching, managing, delivering.

Some significant things happened in this time: not least a global pandemic, killing millions of people (mostly disabled). My mother-in-law died during the second lockdown, we couldn’t visit her in her final days. I had to organise a last-minute move for my parents, for whom I care and have done for years. Then, my beloved dad died, the same week as the print version of the Inklusion Guide was launched, in the midst of me penning the bones of a nature memoir.

It’s been full-on. Hence my writing about burnout, and getting through.  

But it feels like I’m coming out on the other side of something. Like I’m perched on a threshold, my compass-point gently vibrating due North. These last few years have carried so many lessons, so many opportunities to look in and to learn. To sharpen my craft, to find my voice and exactly what I want to say. To learn who to trust and when, most importantly myself.

It feels like some kind of making – we’re never ever complete, thank goodness – but much has been broken, and new things are being built in their place.

Resilience, I think is what I’m getting at. Unbelievably, after everything, there it is.

I think it was my characters who taught it to me best. Conjured from some subconscious part of me who wanted to peer behind the veil, to see if I could find it, to ask the deepest, darkest questions.

Losing my dad, taught me it, too. For it began with days of ‘how can I ever survive this?’, when truly, you believe you can’t. Yet, here I am, my love for him still raw and pink and as fresh as the day I lost him.

Resilience is born of hardship, but it too is born of the beating heart of us. It’s love – for ourselves, our pasts, our inner child, our family (chosen or otherwise), our planet and our attempt to soak it all in; that keeps us rooted in the greatest storms.

I’ve been hanging in the in-between for what feels a lifetime right now. But I’m trying; to be present, every day, even if it’s just in small ways. When I spiral down rabbit holes about not finding a house yet, instead I go for a walk, and spy out all the things I wish to grow in my garden. When I prickle about my limited earning capacity, I set my intentions on how I’m going to generate some revenue without overdoing it. When I feel the long hours of working alone, I make a point of going for a coffee and a walk with a friend. When I feel like I’m not yet where I wanted to be, I look back at how far I’ve come.

My therapist uses the word ‘becoming’ for all of this. I think she’s not wrong. It feels like that.

So, rather than say I’m in the in-between, when I’m desperate to jump to the next thing, the next accolade, the next milestone – I will simply say, I am becoming.

Are you guilty of this, too? What does becoming mean for you? I’d love to hear from you x